313. THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT

You are not to commit adultery.

In the natural sense, this commandment forbids not only committing adultery, but also having obscene desires and realising them, and so indulging in lascivious thoughts and talk. It is clear from these words of the Lord that even lusting is committing adultery:

You have heard that it was said by the men of old, You are not to commit adultery. But I say to you, that if anyone looks at another man's wife so as to lust after her, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart, Matthew 5:27-28.

The reason is that when lust is in the will, it becomes like a deed; for the enticement only enters the understanding, but the intention enters the will, and a lustful intention is a deed. More on this subject can be found in my book CONJUGIAL LOVE AND SCORTATORY ¹ LOVE, published at Amsterdam in 1768. This contains sections on the opposition of [scortatory and] conjugial love (Conjugial Love 423-443); fornication (444-460); types degrees of adultery (478-499); the lust for deflowering (501-505); the lust for variety (506-510); the lust for rape (511-512); the lust for seducing the innocent (513-514); the imputation of either love, both scortatory and conjugial (523-531). All these ideas are meant by this commandment in the natural sense.

Footnotes:

511. THE LUST TO RAPE

By the lust to rape we do not mean the lust to deflower. The lust to deflower is a violation of virgins' virginity, but not of the virgins themselves when it is done with their consent. In contrast, the lust to rape which we take up here recedes in the face of consent and is intensified by refusal. Moreover it is an impulsion to violate any women whatever who absolutely refuse and vehemently resist, whether they are virgins, widows or wives. Such men are like highwaymen and pirates who take delight in goods seized and plundered and not in ones given and justly acquired. They are also like malefactors who pant after things unlawful and forbidden and spurn those which are lawful and allowed.

These violators of women utterly dislike consent and are inflamed by resistance; and if they observe that the resistance is not an internal one, the heat of their lust is, like a fire doused with water, immediately extinguished.

People know that some wives do not automatically submit themselves to their husbands' determinations in regard to the outmost expressions of love, but that they are led by their prudence to put up a show of resistance, as though to acts of violation, in order to expel from their husbands any coldness arising from its ordinariness in consequence of its being continually allowed, and also any coldness arising from a lascivious idea of them as women.

These shows of resistance, however, even though they arouse, still do not cause this lust but are only introductory to it. The cause of the lust comes after conjugial love and likewise licentious love have become, through exercises of them, stale, when in order to be reinvigorated the men wish to be set on fire by absolute efforts at resistance.

This lust thus begun, afterwards grows, and as it grows, it disdains and bursts through all the limits of a love for the opposite sex and exiles itself from them, so that from being a lascivious, carnal and fleshly love it becomes a cartilaginous and bony one; and then, from the periostea, which possess an acute sensibility, it becomes acute.

Still, however, this lust is rare, because it occurs only in those who have entered into marriage and afterward engaged in licentious affairs until these have become stale.

In addition to this natural cause, this lust has also a spiritual cause, which we will say something about later on.